Musings on open educational resources

The Open University and Carnegie Mellon are working on a proposal to develop infrastructure, community and activity to help share research findings on the design and use of OERs. The draft proposal is available on an open wiki at http://iet-public-wiki.open.ac.uk/index.php/OPLRN_proposal with a discussion area available at http://iet-public-wiki.open.ac.uk/index.php/Talk:OPLRN_proposal

I had the chance to meet with Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation and Eric Moeller, Deputy Director. They sent the following along for anyone interested in working for a great organization.

Wikipedia is about to hire a team of three fundraising people: one focusing on major gifts, one focused on “community” (primarily online) fundraising, and one on research and database management. The most unusual and hard-to-cast role will likely be the online fundraiser: we’ve decided it’s most important that this person have a web usability and writing background. For that role, we would probably forgo fundraising experience in favour of strong online communications skills.

The Wikimedia Foundation has three new job openings related to fundraising, open until May 15. The job descriptions and instructions to apply can be found on the Wikimedia Foundation website:

1) A Head of Major Gifts (AKA Major Gifts Officer), responsible for executing our major gifts strategy;

The deadline for nominations for the 2008 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC Awards) is April 14, 2008. The MATC Awards consist of up to ten $50,000 or $100,000 prizes, which a receiving institution can use in a variety of ways to continue its technology leadership. The awards honor not-for-profit institutions that have demonstrated exemplary leadership in the development of open source software for one or more of the constituencies served by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: the arts and humanities in higher education; research libraries, museums; performing arts organizations; and conservation biology.

Awardees are selected by a distinguished committee of technology leaders, including Mitchell Baker, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, John Seely Brown, Vint Cerf, John Gage, and Tim OReilly. Previous winners include higher education institutions, libraries, and museums from North America, Europe, and Asia.

An online nomination form and more information may be found at http://matc.mellon.org or from the sponsor at HostGatorCouponCode.com. The nominations are public: the community is invited to visit the site and comment.

On March 17, 2008 Trustees of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation approved $10,075,000 in Open Educational Resources grants to the following organizations:

Creative Commons (San Francisco, CA) for general support of Creative Commons and ccLearn. ($4,000,000 over 5 years)

Foothill-De Anza Community College District(Los Altos Hills, CA) to plan and pilot the Community College Open Textbook Project ($330,000 over 1 year with additional collaborative funding from Improving Educational Outcomes in California)

Ithaka Harbors, Inc. (New York, NY) to study the development of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative at MIT and the broader impact of the OCW movement on users, institutions, philanthropy, and higher education. ($180,000 over 2 years)

Long Now Foundation (San Francisco, CA) to inspire long-term thinking and foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. (Open Educational Resources $90,000 over 3 years with additional collaborative funding from Performing Arts)

Rice University (Houston, TX) for general support of the Connexions project ($2,000,000 over 3 years)

Silicon Valley Educational Fund (San Jose, CA) for a planning grant to explore the use of OER in the San Jose School District ($180,000 over one year)

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA) for a planning grant to build an open source, scalable, standards-based, end-to-end open webcast system for managing audio and video content acquisition and distribution. ($120,000 over 1 year)

University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI) for a planning grant to support opencourseware in health education with universities in South Africa and Ghana to ensure the project is demand driven. ($225,000 over 1 year)

Full proposals will be availble on the Hewlett Fuondation website in a few weeks.

Laurie Racine has generously offered to Hewlett grantees and other OER projects the use of the dotSUB tools for anything related to translation and closed captioning of any video you might need in multiple languages. There is no cost for this.

To fill you in on this you will find a video post from RocketBoom Ã that talks about the tools as well as a link to the Banker to the Poor video that was done for Ashoka in advance of the Nobel Prize ceremonies (hit the dropdown menu to the right of the video (in the box labeled WATCH) to see what the captioning would look like in other languages. – again hit the dropdown window under WATCH on the right to see the captioning in different languages).

In effect this isn’t only a service, but also another place to syndicate video content – and the video has embed tags similar to YouTube that allows users to run the video on their own sites and blogs. And there is an option to output the captioned video into compressed formats like WMV or Quicktime.